The Trump administration has defended its executive order restricting travel from seven Muslim-majority countries by making three arguments. They claim that it makes America safer, even though there is no evidence that it does. They underplay the number of people affected by the order—emphasizing that around 100 were detained, when its effects are more far-reaching. And they claim that there is precedent—that President Obama restricted travel from Iraq in 2011 and that the seven countries were first identified by Obama and Congress as being sources of terrorism in 2015. On Sunday afternoon, after protests raged at airports across the country and a federal judge blocked the order from being implemented, Trump released this statement:

“My policy is similar to what President Obama did in 2011 when he banned visas for refugees from Iraq for six months. The seven countries named in the Executive Order are the same countries previously identified by the Obama administration as sources of terror.”

On Monday, Obama released a statement—his first since Trump’s inauguration—to speak out against the travel ban. “With regard to comparisons to President Obama’s foreign policy decisions, as we’ve heard before, the President fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion,” Obama’s spokesman said. He’s right. There are serious differences between what Obama did in 2011 and what Trump is doing now—the Obama administration did not ban visas; issued the order in response to a specific threat; and consulted federal agencies prior to issuing the order. Obama promised to speak out “where I think our core values may be at stake.” So far, he’s keeping that promise.

As with everything these days, the Trump administration has managed to mess up what is meant to be routine. On Friday, the White House released a statement in honor of International Holocaust Remembrance Day that failed to mention the genocide of six million Jews. At best, it was a really stupid mistake; at worst, a signal to the many anti-Semites who have cottoned to Trump’s presidency. The statement, which failed to recognize that Jews were the intended targets of a state-sanctioned persecution, drew significant backlash.

In response, the Trump administration has refused to admit error. On Sunday, Chief of Staff Reince Priebus took to Meet the Press to defend the statement. “I mean, everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust including obviously, all of the Jewish people affected and the miserable genocide that occurred—it’s something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad,” he said. “If we could wipe it off of the history books, we would. But we can’t.”

Priebus first posits an alternative history in which the Holocaust was not primarily about the Jews, then declares that this alternative history can’t be erased—this is, for lack of a better term, Orwellian. Administration officials then doubled down, with Press Secretary Sean Spicer telling reporters on Monday that “by and large” Trump has “been praised” for his administration’s statement. As many noted, the only media organs that praised the statement were on the fringe and racist right.

The White House is clinging to the pretense that President Trump’s “extreme vetting” executive order isn’t a Muslim ban, but stuff keeps happening that makes it look an awful lot like a Muslim ban. For instance, if it’s not a ban, why did the president call it a “ban”?

Then along came Israel seeking clarification that the not-in-any-way-religion-based order exempts Jewish people.

Benjamin Netanyahu is just another liberal elitist who took Trump literally, but not seriously.

Brian Beutler today makes the “dispassionate” case for why we should be pessimistic about Trump’s presidency, arguing that his discriminatory refugee and immigration ban has already left “a permanent scar on the country’s credibility” and that there is more where that came from. Beutler is right in warning liberals to resist the kind of hyperbole that characterized the GOP’s unhinged response to Barack Obama, lest they discredit themselves. But I think there is some use, too, in briefly sketching an alarmist case for why we should not only be pessimistic about the future of the Trump administration, but deeply worried.

We know that the gravity of the office will not restrain him, as some had hoped. Neither will establishment figures like Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, who has apparently been swiftly muscled out by former Breitbart head Steve Bannon, newly inducted to the National Security Council. We know that Trump’s incompetence is only matched by his malevolence—that he has no compunction targeting some of the planet’s most vulnerable people, and that he is using executive orders with all the care and precision of a giant vindictive child. We know that he has shown little interest in broadening his appeal beyond his revanchist base, and that his habit is to double down on his mistakes and wildly pillory the media in response. Lost in all the furor surrounding the Muslim ban, for example, was the fact that the White House neglected to specifically cite Jewish victims on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Instead of simply correcting its statement, the administration trotted Priebus out onto the Sunday shows to defend it. He claimed that it addressed “everyone’s suffering in the Holocaust including, obviously, all of the Jewish people.” As many have noted, including Senator Tim Kaine, this is borderline Holocaust denialism.

As Beutler wrote, the institutions of civil society responded with alacrity to Trump’s Muslim ban, ensnaring his executive order in the courts. But the institutions of government are withering, starting with the moribund and morally decrepit Republican Party, the wound that allowed Trump to enter the body politic and hijack it. Meanwhile, the Western world is being buffeted by immense forces, from the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis to upheaval in the Middle East—the very forces that propelled Trump to the White House and continue to upend liberal democracy as we know it. The lesson of the 2016 election is that the system failed us utterly. If President Trump can happen, anything can happen.

All of this is to say that there’s a lot of gasoline lying around and it won’t take much to spark it. This is not to say we’re looking at some imminent version of the Reichstag Fire. Like everyone else, I took heart from the demonstrations at JFK and around the country; it was evidence that America is full of good people and that we are not doomed to some Trumpian dystopia. But just consider what would have happened if the terror attack in Quebec City had occurred in the United States (even if the attack targeted Muslims). With the ban already in place, wouldn’t such an attack become instantly politicized? Would such an attack not justify the ban in the eyes of the Trump administration, and give it grounds to expand it? Can anyone say, with any certainty, that we wouldn’t see tanks in the streets? I don’t think we should succumb to hysteria. But should we be afraid? Absolutely.

Update: The Trump administration is indeed using the attack to justify its immigration ban—even though the lone suspect so far is a French-Canadian.

Trump’s presidency was pitched to Republicans, conservatives, and libertarians as one in which everyone would win. Trump’s base would get The Wall, conservatives would get a Supreme Court justice with an ideology rooted in the early 19th century, and libertarians would get the biggest tax cuts and regulatory repeals since Ronald Reagan. But ten days into Trump’s presidency, the honeymoon period seems to already be over, with a number of factions in the Republican coalition unnerved by Trump’s insecure outbursts and his attention-grabbing and civil liberties-eroding policies, most notably his restriction on travel from seven Muslim-majority countries. 

Trump and the Kochs have never really seen eye to eye—as recently as a month ago, Trump booted David Koch off of his golf course for inviting Harry Hurt, who wrote a salacious biography of Trump over two decades ago. Trump’s cabinet nevertheless looked like it could have been hand-picked by the Kochs—it is made up of a number of their allies, most notably Mike Pompeo and Betsy DeVos. But at the Koch network’s annual summit, which took place over the weekend, Charles Koch spoke out against the Muslim ban, saying, “We have a tremendous danger because we can go the authoritarian route ... or we can move toward a free and open society.”

The Kochs may be tempting allies for some in the #resistance. They are not only deep-pocketed, but also  prove that opposition to Trump’s low-rent authoritarianism is bipartisan. Perhaps most enticingly, they have relationships with a number of lawmakers and could lean on their allies to oppose Trump. The Democrats in the Senate, after all, only need a handful of Republicans to fight Trump legislatively.  

But the Kochs are an enemy of everything that the opposition to Trump should stand for. For four decades, they have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into eroding democratic norms, redistributing wealth from the bottom to the very, very top, and destroying a regulatory framework and social safety net that protects workers and families from environmental destruction and extreme poverty. They have been pushing for a plutocratic government for years—one that will reward a handful of billionaires while punishing everyone else. In Trump, they are reaping exactly what they have sown—they should be held accountable for that, not given a plum spot in the resistance.

Last Friday, during her meeting with Donald Trump, the British prime minister announced that Trump was invited to an official state visit to England. She immediately met with a massive backlash from her electorate; a petition demanding that the Queen cancel the visit gathered more than one million signatures over the weekend.

Trump, it turns out, isn’t so popular with the British public, perhaps because of his lewd tweets about Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, as well as his general sexism and racism. There’s also the fact that Trump’s executive order on immigration might ban certain dual-citizen Brits from traveling to the United States, although that matter is murky because of the ambiguous execution of the policy.

Now May is trying to distance herself from the state visit, saying it wasn’t her idea but the decision of the “State Visit Committee.” The only problem with this excuse is that until this morning, British journalists had never heard of the “State Visit Committee.” As one commenter notes, May’s attempt to pass the blame “to the Foreign Office and a committee which may or may not exist was just petrified cowardice.”

The president began his work week signing an order to cut two regulations from the federal bureaucracy for every new regulation created. He’s making good on a campaign pledge, and changing the subject from his recent order banning the entry of people from seven Muslim-majority countries—a move that created chaos at airports, spurred massive protests and successful legal challenges, and even drew rebukes from some leading Republicans.

This gimmicky order will impose the arbitrary elimination of government rules, completely divorced from the question of their usefulness. This sort of thing may be an applause line at CPAC—and it’s certainly consistent with the conservative moment’s Norquistian project of indiscriminately slashing government—but it sets up a quantitative evaluation system for regulations instead of a qualitative one. It’s premised on the idea that the number of rules is more important than whether those rules are actually serving a vital purpose. This is not how good government works.

The administration’s latest executive order gives Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, a permanent position on the National Security Council. This unprecedented move puts the former Breitbart News executive on the same level as Flynn, Trump’s national security advisor. Bannon, like many in Trump’s circle, is obviously unqualified for the position. His background as a former naval officer, investment banker, and Breitbart executive leaves much to be desired in terms of credentials.

But the reorganization of the NSC also casts Flynn’s position into doubt. According to The New York Times, Bannon is “helping to fill a staff leadership vacuum created, in part, by Mr. Flynn’s stumbling performance as national security advisor.” Further, Flynn’s “overbearing demeanor” and “penchant for talking too much” have begun to annoy the president. This is a different tune than the one that was sung right after the election, in which Flynn was considered a “powerful influence” on Trump.

This would not be the first time that Flynn has been found wanting. In 2014, Flynn was fired as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency one year before his term was up. Flynn insisted that he was pushed out of his job for his controversial views on Islam, but those familiar with the situation attributed his firing to the chaotic mess that resulted from his attempts to overhaul the agency.

The Trump administration, via White House Press Secretary and noted gum-chewer Sean Spicer, insists that Bannon’s elevation to the NSC is welcomed by Flynn. But one can’t help but think otherwise.

Much of the right rose to President Donald Trump’s defense over the weekend, standing by his chaos-creating executive order suspending immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries. House Speaker Paul Ryan issued a statement Friday saying, “Trump is right to make sure we are doing everything possible to know exactly who is entering our country.” As Dave Weigel reported in The Washington Post, Fox News joined notoriously pro-Trump outlets like Breitbart and Gateway Pundit in providing positive coverage of the administration’s actions.

But as the Post’s Aaron Blake reports, 16 GOP members of Congress have come out against the executive order and 27 more are voicing concerns about it. Beyond vocal opponents like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told ABC News, “I think we need to be careful; we don’t have religious tests in this country.”

“It’s hopefully going to be decided in the courts as to whether or not this has gone too far,” McConnell added.

Just one week into Trump’s administration, this was evidence that a rift could be growing between the new president and Republicans on Capitol Hill. Despite its popularity in much of the conservative media, his action was criticized by the more establishment conservative editorial boards of The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Examiner. “This is inhumane, unjust, and irrational,” the Examiner wrote, under the headline “Scrap this half-baked immigration order and start over.” The Koch brothers said the order would likely be “counterproductive.”

This criticism comes at a time when establishment Republican priorities—including Obamacare repeal—may be in jeopardy. But there’s no guarantee the GOP is ready for a full-on fight with the president just yet. If we’ve learned anything from the rise of Trump, it’s that establishment Republicans seldom have the courage, conviction, or ability to stand in his way.